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Hi,
You can use bit.ly for backlinks, but keep in mind, they are 301 redirects, so you lose a bit of link juice when search engines step through them.
If you chose to do this, you'll also want to tag the URLs before you shortlink them, otherwise your Google Analytics reporting will show all that traffic as Direct/(none) in the Channel report.
Are you talking about the incentives for Mozpoints? If so, they can be found here: https://moz.com/community/mozpoints
Hi,
Putting 3 city names in your title tags is going make them way longer than the recommended character count for titles. This will probably also look a bit spammy to search engines. I'd recommend reading through Moz's guide to local SEO, which can be found here: https://moz.com/learn/local. One thing to note though, it's very difficult to rank for local keywords in a city that you don't have a physical presence in. For location-based queries, search algorithms tend to show results for based on geographical proximity since it better matches the intent of the searcher.
Happy optimizing!
Hi ,
Did you follow all of Google's Change of Address instructions? If redirects are in place, chances are you missed something else minor that can have a big impact.
Hi,
Google Analytics is pretty good about assigning proper attribution to channels. If you had been sending out emails prior to tagging the links, that traffic was falling under either Direct or (Other).
PPC is the only medium that would cannibalize organic since you can have impressions in both spaces at the same time. The drop in organic traffic could just be the ebb and flow of your business. Since most businesses have seasonality, year over year comparison is often a better yard stick for performance.
Is there a particular search engine that you can attribute the traffic loss to? Or perhaps a piece of content received more entrances last week simply due to the timeliness of that content?
Hi,
Duplicates of this nature can only be fixed by adding canonical tags to one preferred version of that product. When you have multiple instances of the product throughout many categories, search engines aren't sure which to show, so they'll usually not show any of your results. For more on canonical tags, read this Moz article.
You cannot remove it from the Moz report, as that's part of its purpose - to show you instances of duplicate content.
Hi Daniel,
SEO requires a great deal of patience. Your site is only 8 months old, and depending on your industry, it could take much longer than that to achieve good organic visibility. I would not recommend moving to a new domain, that won't solve your problem, it will only confuse the search engines more. You've had a lot of ups and downs it sounds like, so hold tight. I just migrated a site from HTTP to HTTPS and it took 3 months for Google to completely drop the old HTTP URLs out of the index. These things take time.
It sounds like your site could benefit from some on-site optimization. Build out a keyword map (pairing each KW with a specific URL), you don't want to have too many topics on one page, and you don't want to have too many pages for one topic (one piece of content = one URL).
Hi,
You definitely want to avoid redirects where possible, so scratch option number 2. Redirection causes you to lose about 10% of the authority that page has built up. Google tends to prefer pages that they have known about for a while.
If you were to do option 2, you'd also have to update all of your internal links to point to the new page, as well as outreach to any external linking sites to have them update.
All you need to do is take the source code for the variation page and make it the source code for the original.
It sounds like you may have used Google Content Experiments. If that's the case, the additional URL created for your variation doesn't need to be excluded from crawls or disallowed, Google knows it's there and there's no other way to get to it other than the code snippet they utilize to send your sample to the variation.
Becky,
The best scenario would be to roll out secure to the whole site and then apply a 301 redirect rule directing all http to https. But since you can't do that, your next best bet is going to be canonical tags. Canonicals are 'soft 301 redirects' and search engines treat them very similarly to an actual 301 redirect. I would go that route in the meantime until you're able to go secure site-wide.
This guide that Cyrus Shepard put together will be helpful when you get to the point of fully integrating HTTPS: https://moz.com/blog/seo-tips-https-ssl
Hi,
First things first, it's a common misconception that the robots.txt disallow: / will prevent indexing. It's only indented to prevent crawling, which is why you don't get a meta description pulled into the result snippet. If you have links pointing to that page and a disallow: / on your robots, it's still eligible for indexation.
Second, it's pretty weird that the noindex tag isn't effective, as that's the only sure-fire way to get de-indexed intentionally. I would recommend creating an XML sitemap for all URLs on that domain that are noindex'd and resubmit that in Search Console. If Google hasn't crawled your site since adding the noindex, they don't know it's there. In my experience, forcing them to recrawl via XML submission has been effective at getting noindex noticed quicker.
I would also recommend taking a look at the link profile and removing any possible links pointing to your noindex pages, this will help future attempts at indexing.
You can write a single redirect rule that will apply to any request on the hostname. I'm not sure what server you're using, but if you use HTACCESS, there's a great post on StackOverflow on how to apply this rule: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/29029049/best-practice-301-redirect-http-to-https-standard-domain
Hi,
Generally speaking, any link that takes users off of your site should open in a new tab. If you send them away in the same tab, they're probably not coming back to your site. Especially with social media, they're likely to get distracted with something else and forget about what they were doing in the first place.
So you're tracking "np - /google-structured-data-update/" as a keyword in Moz? If so, you should just delete that because it's not actually a keyword.
The only purpose "NP - /some-interior-site-page/" serves is to regain a small amount of the keyword data GA took from us starting back in 2011. See this article for more details: https://blog.kissmetrics.com/unlock-keyword-not-provided/
When you remove redirects, you also effectively remove any links pointing to your site that pass through those redirects. For this reason, it's not usually recommended that redirects are removed. Something I do to track which redirects are actually being hit, is adding source/medium UTMs to the resolving URL of my redirects - see example below. This pushes data into Google Analytics and allows me to see which redirects I don't need (i.e., if they don't show up in GA reports after a specified time frame), and which ones are still active.
Example of 301 redirect with source/medium UTMs:/my-old-URL >>> /my-new-URL?utm_source=/my-old-URL&utm_medium=301
That being said, if you had some high quality links passing through any of those redirects, it could certainly cause a drop in DA.
It's not recommended to change URLs for the sake of rankings. Check out this article for a comment straight from Google on this topic: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-urls-seo-17889.html.
Stephanie,
YouMoz is a section of the blog completely dedicated to user generated content. Though it looks like they've paused submissions while they reconfigure some things regarding YouMoz and the Moz community.
Hi,
Your XML sitemap should only contain 'clean URLs'. By that I mean only 200 status URLs.
You should not have any redirects or error pages. You should also make sure you've got the preferred format; i.e. www vs. non-www and https vs. http.
Looks to me like Google can't properly access your XML sitemap. I tried to put it into 2 different validator tools and URI Valet and none of those tools were able to access it. It could be something with HTTPS. Did you recently switch the site over to secure?
Hi,
I wouldn't measure your copywriter based on WPM, I'd focus instead on the quality of the writing. I recommend measuring based on the performance of the content. Is it helping improve rankings? Driving traffic? Nurturing leads? Increasing sales? I don't know what your line of business is, but I would choose some KPIs by which you measure the effectiveness of the content being produced. It doesn't matter if it's 1 WPM if that creates 3x as much revenue as content that was written at 100 WPM.
Hi,
I never recommend URL changes for the purpose of improving rankings. While URL structure is a ranking factor, it's not a big enough one to justify restructuring your URLs for. See this article for more on how insignificant this is as a ranking signal.
Hi,
Ideally, you would handle www and nonwww duplication by way of a redirect rule. Both versions of that URL should not render, i.e. when you go to www.example.com it should take you straight over to example.com.
You can handle this with canonical tags the way you've proposed, the URL in the href element should be the one you prefer. However, this should be reserved only as a work-around in the event that you can't get implement a server-side redirect rule to handle ALL www-to-nonwww issues.
Hi,
Don't let someone else benefit from content you worked hard to create. If they want to reference it, they can link to that particular piece of content within their own content. So option number one is the best of the 3 you've laid out, I'd be picky about how much of a teaser you allow them to copy though. Give them enough to want to click the link to your site, but not so much that they don't need to click that link.
Not at all. Bookmarks are no indication of the quality of the content or a website as a whole.
If there were any truth to this, it'd be ridiculously easy to game the system - think of a large company with thousands of computers in their offices, they could have their IT team pre-install Chrome with any number of bookmarked links they want - way too easy.
This type of duplicate applies to far more than just the homepage...so by implementing a single redirect rule, you handle this type of duplicate for every single URL on your site, and neither people nor search engines will ever see the undesired version.
If you do this via canonical tags, you have to include the canonical tag on every page, which could be very time consuming depending on how large your site is.
Responses to the first 3 questions:
Now that I have the domain, I see a few problems.
If this currently live version of the site is placeholder for development, I'd recommend putting the old site back out there and working on the new site in a development environment.
The ideal situation would be to create more unique content on these pages. You're getting duplicate errors because more than 90% of the source code on the dictionary pages is a match. When you consider the header and footer, and the other code for the template, it's the same everywhere. The dictionary pages are very thin on content, so it's not enough to differentiate. If you can, build out the content more.
Here's a few ways you might add more content to each dictionary page:
Thanks for that clarification CleverPhD, forgot to mention that.
Hi,
I don't see this as an either or thing, if people find the website useful enough to go down to that next funnel stage, they're going to do their research and find those reviews regardless. If customer experience outweighs local SEO, there should be more effort at not having one star reviews, right? In lieu of improving custom service or whatever problems led to those reviews, they should be responded to and handled appropriately. People generally don't have a problem with bad reviews if the situation was handled well by the company. You could also work on increasing the number of reviews to over power the junk ones. Ask the client to reach out to their best customers and simply ask them to review. I've found it's very helpful when doing this to include detailed instructions to minimize confusion and make it as easy as possible for the reviewers.
You're in the driver's seat here. _You _have the content _they _want. If you lay down your requirements and they don't want to play, then don't give them permission to use your content. It's really that simple. You're gaining nothing here with their rules, and they gain a lot. You should both be winning in this situation.
Looks like there all there, check this query. Am I missing something?
Hi David,
You will lose indexation for the non-canonical URLs, so keep that in mind. If you don't get much organic traffic to the off-brand, than that's probably not a problem.
If that is the case though, I'm wondering why even build out a site for the off-brand?
I just ran this query for bvstate URLs indexed for the H&R Block site. Mozbar shows canonical tags with bvstate in them, and Screaming Frog finds no canonical tags at all. There is a deeper issue that is not simply Google ignoring them.
Google is indexing non-www, so I'd recommend sticking with that version. Similar to what you've done with the HTTP > HTTPS redirect, you should set up a redirect rule so send all www > non-www.
It doesn't matter which you go with in the end (www or non-www), the important thing is you choose one version and stick with it.
Hi Harry,
I've done this a number of times when taking over campaigns for other 'agencies'. It's a pretty common task for most SEOs. It usually involves some de-optimization of the ranking page in order to shift that emphasis over to your preferred page. Check out Moz's on-page grader, that might give you some insight into why the homepage is overpowering the interior pages.
Rand did a really good Whiteboard Friday on this topic about a month ago. It's definitely worth watching if you haven't already, you might find the key to what you're looking for: https://moz.com/blog/wrong-page-ranks-for-keywords-whiteboard-friday
Hi Chris,
This is a common misconception about the robots.txt file. It's not intended to remove URLs from the index, only to prevent crawling of URLs/folders/parameters/etc.
Here's a quote straight from the Search Console Help site: "You should not use robots.txt as a means to hide your web pages from Google Search results."
You can temporarily remove that URL using Search Console. To permanently remove it, you'll need to add a meta robots noindex tag, the only sure-fire way to prevent indexation. Here's what that tag looks like:
You're off to a great start. Also be sure to check out Moz's new Keyword Explorer: https://moz.com/explorer. This will be really helpful in expanding your keyword list to be inclusive of more variations and other related topics to cover.
Wanted to jump back in on this topic as I've just confirmed my initial suspicion.
I just added a new client to our Moz account and had the exact same issue, crawler unable to access the robots.txt file. It's a secure site and was configured in Moz without the HTTPS. When I go to the robots.txt file without https://www, it redirects to the same thing as yours where the / between the TLD and page path gets removed.
Reconfigure your site and it should begin to work.
Hi Jason,
Yes, you should remove them. Assuming you have non-www to www redirects in place, those links are still resolving and therefore counting against your site.
I cannot believe I'm answering this question in 2016. Do. Not. Buy. Links. Ever.
The idea of buying links goes against everything Google wants their search results to be. If good ranking is simply a matter of spending money, than any hack out there with deep enough pockets can get their garbage site to rank for anything.
Read this, commit this to memory, remember this when developing new link building strategies: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356?hl=en
According to this article by Rand, you should not point a canonical back to the main page. If you're marking up pagination correctly, you do not need a canonical tag on the paginated URLs, only on page=1 pointing back to the main page since these are actually the same thing.
Hi James,
As with most things in SEO, the answer is 'it depends'. If the only service you offer is 'campervan hire', I believe the homepage for that would work. Then, as you've already mentioned you do, have pages built out for more specifics terms like locations.
I think there are use-cases for using the homepage for some high-level, top of the funnel keywords that broadly describe a business. But for the most part, I do agree with the Yoast article, as it can be difficult to put content on the homepage of a site while maintaining the aesthetics of a homepage.
I'd recommend pagination over scrolling. The primary reason being load time. If you've got 8 pages worth of content displaying on one page, it's going to take forever to load.
Hi,
Those keywords are all essentially the same thing, maybe with the exception of 'catered' and 'luxury', but even then, you'd have a hard time writing unique enough content for those 2 variation sets. If you tried to write content for each of those keywords individually, you'd end up with almost identical content, worded slightly different. If the only thing this client does is ski chalets, you'd probably be better served to use the home page as your target URL for these terms.
As for additional content, I'd recommend a blog or FAQ section that provides additional information about the area, attractions, things to do, etc.
The domain name won't play a role in ranking, that's an old SEO tactic that Google squashed years ago. There are many other things that could be preventing your site from getting to the first page, like overall site quality, backlink profile, the list goes on and on....
Greg,
Have you tried creating multiple XML sitemaps by section of the site, like by folder or by product detail pages? 70,000 is a huge amount of URLs and even if you could get them all on one sitemap, I wouldn't recommend it. Nesting sitemaps into an index sitemap can help Google understand your site structure and make it easier for you to troubleshoot indexing problems should they arise.
Hi,
According to this article, John Mueller says Google doesn't weigh URLs that heavily when determining rank. I always advise against changing URLs unless it's absolutely necessary, as you'll lose about 15% of the page's current PR when you redirect it.
This article also directly says to not change URLs for SEO purposes: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-urls-seo-17889.html
Hi there,
I haven't heard of using product markup on category pages until reading your question. It's a good idea and while researching I came across this other thread from a couple years ago: https://moz.com/community/q/google-rich-snippets-in-e-commerce-category-pages
My main concern is that most ecomm category pages have a lot of products showing by default, and if you've got a snippet of JSON+LD for each of those, you're going to hurt your page speeds. Just something to be mindful of and monitor if you do decide to go this route.
Hi,
Your statement "I know that targeting more than one keyword per page in a website leads to keyword cannibalization" is close, but not quite true. Keyword cannibalization happen you talk about the same topic or keyword set across multiple pages, search engines aren't sure which to rank higher, so they usually opt for none of them.
Content should be centered around topics these days, not keywords. Based on the sample blog topics you shared, it seems like you're doing that quite well. You're still talking about CRMs but in different ways, so I think your strategy is good.
Hi Melissa,
For your top pages, in Google Analytics go to: Behavior > Site Content > All Pages or Landing Pages
For your top organic search terms, you'll need to go to Google Search Console (formerly Webmaster Tools) - then go to Search Traffic > Search Analytics > and choose 'Queries'
You can still see some search terms in Google Analytics, but they technically took away that feature when they went to secure search about 3 years ago. But you're better off using Search Console to view this information.
Here's a few links that'll help you learn the ropes:
https://moz.com/blog/absolute-beginners-guide-to-google-analytics
Those blogs posts are going to be your long-tail keywords, so the more specific you get with the keywords that you target, the better. Put yourself in the mindset of someone who would benefit from that content, then try to think about what you would search for to get to that content. For example, for your post "Steps to follow in buying a CRM", some qualified queries might be "things to consider when choosing a CRM", "how to choose a CRM", "what do I need to know before buying a CRM".
Skyler,
You're close, give this a shot:
Disallow: /*?utm_
This will be inclusive of all UTM tags regardless of what comes before the tag or what element you have first.